I apologize – this was meant to be out yesterday (Friday) but it was a busy day, and I got distracted with other things. So it’s out today.
First things first – please go and read Inspiration Porn goes to the Prom on A Diary of a Mom. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
There’s a very important question that Jess asks in there. (Thanks, Jess.)
“What if you are that person?”
I haven’t posted much (if at all) about inspiration porn on here. But I was reading this post (I get new posts sent to my email), and… I just felt I needed to respond to it.
What if I were that person?
First of all, I’d be really, really upset about the fact that someone wrote this story without asking me first. (This applies to both examples – and hell, any other example you can think of where someone is mentioned in a story involving inspiration porn, or anything else for that matter, when they aren’t asked about it.) I don’t know if it’s a direct violation of various Privacy Acts, but still. If it isn’t, it should be.
Secondly… yeah, the people doing the helping, or the asking, or whatever, are generally doing a good thing. A nice thing. (Given the girl in the specific prom example apparently defended her choice of date to her friends, yeah, that works.)
But they’re doing something that should be Standard Operating Procedure. This is not meant to be something newsworthy! And even if people do feel it’s newsworthy, that there are people who are kind/nice enough to follow that “should be SOP”… the post I’m responding to is right. The stories shouldn’t be about the “normal people doing something nice for someone with a disability”. (Especially if the person with a disability isn’t even consulted about said story.)
You know what the stories should be about?
Why do people have to do things like this? Why don’t we have supports and accomodations in place to deal with situations like this (though I admit the whole “asking to the prom” would be a difficult situation for those) so that people don’t apparently need to go out of their way to be kind?
If you want to write a story about a situation like the examples in Jess’s post – why not write them about that?
(And for the sake of everyone – get permission before putting anything up.)
All right, rant basically over. It’s late and I need to go to bed. But I’ve wanted to get this off my chest since I read Jess’s post, and figured I’d have trouble sleeping if I didn’t. So, there you are.
‘Later, all!
😐 tagÂûght
Whoof. And augh, so much.
Yeah. Some conservative websites tend to refer to stuff like that (and not in an approving way!) as “Virtue signaling”. As in, “Look at me, I’m obviously a Good Person because I did X.”
I don’t know; I was raised to believe that “you’re supposed to do what’s right even if no one is watching. Especially if no one is watching.” Most people I run into these days, though… if it doesn’t give them some payoff, they don’t understand what the point is.